The senior sermon of Edwin Beckham, Class of 2008 from the Diocese of Atlanta, given on September 12, 2007, in Christ Chapel

1 Kings 17:1-24

Ps 119:49-72

Phi 2:1-11

Mt 2:1-12

“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts

be acceptable to You, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer.”

Outside the text of your specifically religious life, have you ever made a journey to pay homage to someone or something? I reckon that most of you have, as have I. In fact I’ve made several of these sorts of journeys, but one in particular stood out when I considered the story in today’s Gospel lesson from St. Matthew. I believe it was the spring of 1991, just a few weeks before my wedding – a bachelor pilgrimage, if you will. There were four of us wise men in this case, wise with our newly minted college degrees – or at least on the way to being wise in the case of a couple of my buddies who were on the 5-year-plan . . .

My college graduation gift, you see – uncovered by my best friend Laura, in the classified ads of a town 100 miles away – had been a 1981 Volkswagen Van, with the complete Westphalia camper package. Now who among you would be very excited about acquiring a 9-year-old car? Well, this was no ordinary car, of course. To me, to my buddies and I, it was a veritable magic carpet, crying out to be flown to strange, distant lands. It was a camel, too, outfitted for modern-day wise men, containing not only sleeping space for four, a stove and refrigerator, but a sink with its very own water tanks, both fresh and gray. This vehicle was built to follow stars.

So to where would four wise men from the East – OK, we were all bona fide sons of the SOUTHEAST – to where would 22-year-olds like us want to ride this magic carpet, this beautiful camel? To Memphis, Tennessee, of course. And what were we seeking there? To what and whom did the star point? Well, you can probably imagine. With us very much still en route, the star first stopped over Tupelo , Mississippi, birthplace of The Great One, Elvis Aron Presley. We paid homage as best we knew how, buying a bumper sticker here, a shot glass there, poking our noses into the wedding chapel, and pushed on to the west. The star next stopped over Oxford , where we paid our respects at Rowan Oak, final home of that great chronicler of the tragic, post-Civil War South, William Faulkner.

From there it was just a 2-hour jaunt north to Memphis, where we spent the next two days making the rounds to all the holy sites: Graceland, of course; the Peabody Hotel; Beale Street, the old haunt of W.C. Handy and friends and the incubator of the Memphis blues; Sun Records, where Sam Phillips recorded Elvis’s first song direct to wax, going on to also record Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and much of the rest of the great rockers of the 1950s and early ‘60s; and last but most certainly not least, we paid homage to that most sacred of American icons, the Mississippi River, perching ourselves atop the levee late on a Saturday afternoon to watch the sun go down on a legend.

The star we followed to Memphis illuminated a city and a region representative of so much culture it cannot be captured in a simple list. So to what were my friends and I really paying homage? Almost 300 years of North American culture had set a star of sorts over Memphis . The city’s culture over that span of time had become rich in the folkways, work habits, economic, psychological and faith struggles, and the resulting musical and literary creativity, of poor to working-class Southerners, both Native-, Euro- and African-American. Realizing only that homage was due to such evocative literature, such beautiful, soulful music, such egalitarian and visionary entrepreneurship, such delicious food, we went. We went without the analysis, without stepping back for the big picture. We just followed the star of celebrity, of notoriety, of pop and folk culture.

I would submit to you, my friends, that as we venture off this seminary block – daily, seasonally, and certainly as graduates going out to do the ministry we have been called to do, we will encounter plenty of wise folk following a star. If we listen, we will find that they are looking for us, for the Church, and ultimately for the God of Israel to whom our ekklesia points. This goal may not at first be explicit in what they say and what they do. Their own particular culture or subculture may not offer the language for it. But if we pay attention we will nonetheless find many, many people looking for life, for love, for transformation.

Are we prepared to welcome, show, encourage, and guide those who have seen a star and are seeking the God to which it points? Are we prepared to do “all in our power to support these persons in their life in Christ?” How will we treat the wise men & women who come seeking what we have here? First and foremost – for we are a people of common prayer – we should be prayerful, asking for reminders of God’s grace, and for strength and courage to do the work we have been given to do. With intention, with constant and unswerving intention, we will then be ready to welcome, support, initiate and teach.

Yes, in this post-Christian age we will have to teach. This is perhaps the greatest challenge and the place where our education here will be most thoroughly tested, but it is also the most exciting. Katharine, our Presiding Bishop – and she did ask me in person to call her Katharine – the PB put it this way just the other day to the students of Union Seminary in New York: “The task of theological education really is” she said, “to help us learn to do theology -- to relate our own stories, and the stories of those around us, to the great stories of our faith, so that we may be able to give an account of the faith that is within us.”

Just Monday in history class, for example, we read The Venerable Bede’s account of the first Northumbrian King to convert to Christianity – I think his name was Edwin? We discussed the characteristics of Northumbrian culture at the time and the way Paulinus and the other evangelists to the kingdom seemed able to offer up the Gospel story in a way that could be readily appropriated by that culture. In a patronage-based, gift-giving culture, what better way to be introduced to the Gospel message than to hear that God is the supreme gift-giver and the source of the only lasting gift, Jesus the Christ, God enfleshed with our humanity, come to us for our salvation. Can we, will we be able to enter into the lives, cultures and languages of those around us in ways that allow those following the star to appropriate the good news for themselves?

And what, my friends, will our own particular strivings for the kingdom look like to those seekers who stumble across us while following that star? Or perhaps more appropriately, what should those strivings look like? What kind of corporate life should these seekers expect to find among us? Paul’s dramatic and classic description of the mind of Christ, in today’s passage from his letter to the quarreling Christians at Philippi , gives us a pretty good start: “be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Unity, humility and selflessness. It’s that simple! It is these characteristics, Paul indicates, that describe the very mind of our Lord and Savior, who, though begotten from the beginning of time – from outside time – though one with the Triune godhead, “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” and “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death.”

Brothers and sisters, please don’t think me naïve – however true that may be! Unity, humility and selflessness make for a tall order. This is so in the Church – we see that clearly enough in the current climate, do we not? – and certainly in the world. What could it possibly mean, for instance, to look to the interests of others and to be “selfless” out in the business world, the world where nothing stays viable for very long, whether an entire corporation, a division, a department, or a person, without steadily increasing efficiency and productivity that can be accrued to the bottom line? Where does selflessness fit there?

Could being more conscientious consumers and investors be an act of selflessness? I would certainly like to think so, and occasionally I act on that hope, buying organic peaches or fair trade coffee, let’s say. Just yesterday, though, I heard a former Secretary of Labor discount the possibility that even dramatically increased socially responsible investing and consumption can have much of an influence on the actual social costs of what he is now calling “super capitalism.” We may have to push our imaginations further.

Indeed, in the light of the star over Bethlehem we should not forget what happens at the other end of St. Matthew’s gospel. There, this same infant lauded and worshiped as King of the Jews by the gift-giving, Gentile wise men – the one whose messiah-ship St. Matthew is so eager to convince us of – this very infant grew up to become the same man mocked as King of the Jews by both the Roman soldiers and the leading members of his own people; the same man tried on trumped up charges, humiliated, and executed for sedition by a ‘great’ civilization.

Do we think for a moment that the soulful, mud-colored beauty of Memphis, Tennessee – or any culture, at any time – cannot yield a similarly violent, tragic story? If so, we have only to recall April 4, 1968 and Martin King, returning against the better judgment of his advisors to support a segment of the same population whose culture my friends and I so joyfully celebrated – in this case the city’s sanitation workers. We have only to remember the Poor People’s March, the sun going down behind the mighty Mississippi after another long, tiring day full of marching and meetings, and the stunned, desperate face of the Rev. Jesse Jackson on the motel balcony, holding Martin’s body in his arms as the lifeblood drained out.

No . . . unity, selflessness and humility are not often easy things to imagine, much less to achieve, whether inside the Church or outside. We may even struggle with finding the right language. As Rowan Williams puts it in an essay on the Church’s interface with the world: “The Christian engaged at the frontier with politics, art or science will frequently find that he or she will not…know…what…to…say.” So, the Christian’s urgent desire to proclaim the good news, he adds, “must often be channeled into listening and waiting, and into the expansion of the Christian imagination itself into something that can cope with the seriousness of the world.”

For us, for the Church, this is a call to deliberation, to doing good theology, indeed it is a call to intentionality, to doing the day-to-day, hour-by-hour work St. Paul urged on the Philippians, the work that must go into emptying oneself as Christ did, into acquiring the “mind of Christ.” As we determine how best to communicate with those travelers from a far country, those seekers after a secular king, an ultimate experience, a tidbit of Gnostic wisdom, a new way of living, let us be intentional.

But a bit of warning. That intentionality might look pretty mundane to us newly minted liturgists and theologians extraordinaire. It might not always involve grand demonstrations and great displays of power and finesse. When I was a grad student in American history at the University of Georgia in the early ‘90s, I was privileged to hear Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. speak in the Student Union about the so-called culture wars. In higher education at the time, the culture wars were focused on such things as hate speech, minority quotas and diversity, and the literary canon, still chock full of dead white male writers, and how it might be revised. Dr. Gates, a preeminent professor of literature and African-American studies then teaching at Harvard, or perhaps Princeton, developed a simple but rich refrain in his speech. When inevitably coming back around yet again to how hot under the collar so many folk seemed to get about which books should be in, and which out, about the planning of another public protest or the writing of another letter to the editor, Gates would simply suggest: “actually, that one’s just another agenda item for the English department meeting.”

And so, brothers and sisters, Christ is born in us today, and the stars illuminate our joy, our reverence, our liturgy, our hospitality, our commitment to God’s mercy, justice, and peace, and even our internal strife and our struggles to do good theology . . . and where do we attend to these things, ensuring that wise travelers from afar will have the best chance to see and appropriate these things? Not only in our prayers, not only in our public forums, but primarily as we slog through each hour, day and week, in Worship Committee meetings, in Vestry Meetings, in diocesan council meetings, in the cloud of e-mails we send into the ether.

For now, though, for a short respite, we are isolated . . . no, we are insulated from much of this concern about how the world experiences the Church, insulated by our life here at ETSS. This does bother me sometimes. Many of you know this already. And yet, there is good reason for our insulation, for the room to concentrate on what we are up to here. I am deeply grateful to God, to my family, to my bishop, for the privilege of being able to concentrate, to spend three years immersed in our studies, our corporate formation, our parish and hospital experiences, sharing in the prayers and the breaking of bread as we better learn to remember Christ’s death, proclaim Christ’s resurrection, and await Christ’s coming in glory.

But the world off this block will not mirror this community in most respects. Indeed the world does not mirror it even now. We have only to listen to the death and destruction around us as mediated by radio and television, to listen to a loved-one just back from a grueling day at work, to listen to the grieving parent of another dead soldier, to listen to the rhythmic, mechanized wheeze of the respirator in the pediatric ICU room, to be reminded of the world’s brokenness.

If we are prepared to recognize them for who, in fact, they are, there will be travelers from that world streaming toward the star for as long as we care to imagine. There will be wise women and men, many of them much wiser than me, yet looking to us – to Christ’s body in the world – for what we appear to have that they feel lacking; looking for comfort, for a word of hope, for meaning, for a way to pay homage, for transformation. It seems to me this is a responsibility we take on with utmost care. Do we not want to be deliberate, intentional, doing whatever we humanly can, by the grace of God, to offer them everything we have learned, everything we have participated in, every morsel of the Truth we have come to know, so that, like the magi from a distant land, overjoyed at the sight they discovered in Bethlehem, their knees too would bend, their tongues, too, would confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father?